Dear loving people, how often do you listen to people
who either place a limit on their potentials or sell themselves too cheap? I get that all
the times and its painful, let me elucidate with an Anecdote of Success.
Samson is a good friend of mine; he is really
infected with what I call the Self-Limiting Syndrome (SLS). Traveling from Wum
to Bamenda in the North West Region some years back by public transport, we got
abandoned in the middle of the forest when the bus got bad.
After sitting there for hours waiting for a
solution that was not forth coming, I suggested to my friend that we should be waiting
for an oncoming car while reducing the distance on foot. Samson got embarrassed
by my suggestion and was quick to tell me he can’t do the rest of the 25 miles
on foot. I told him that he could only find out the truth of he tried and so we
left.
We were just five miles gone and he really began
to give out. “I’m tired, my heart’s
pounding, I can’t go anymore” he told me breathlessly. I insisted that we
keep on since there was no sign of an oncoming car. He thundered, “Abongta if I
walk anymore,” –and we’re still walking- “if I walk anymore I’m liable to collapse
or have a heart attack and die.”
I smiled and told him frostily to die if he felt
like it. Samson got so mad that we did the rest of the 20 miles to Bafut where
we could get a cab in total silence, each of us lost in his thoughts.
When we got comfortably sited in the cab and
driving towards Bamenda town, Samson could not help it any further and so asked
me angrily “for heaven’s sake, why did you say that I should die if I wanted to?”
My reply was simple and straightforward “You might
as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do,
physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll
spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no
limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond
them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”
This is what I learned from Bruce Lee, the legendary martial art
master. I think it should be same for any success oriented person.
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